Thread by @5thCenturyStoic

An Ugly Blasphemous Graffito of Jesus—My Favorite Picture of Jesus

It’s crude. It’s looks as though some bored kid doodled on a school desk.
It’s a mockery. A smear. Literally an ancient meme meant to humiliate.
And yet, I love it. Deeply in fact.

The Alexamenos graffito is....

not a prestigious stained-glass Jesus.
It’s not the gentle shepherd, halo aglow Jesus.
This Jesus has the head of a donkey and hangs bare on a cross.
Ugly. Ridiculous. Offensive.
Precisely what the Roman Empire thought of the gospel.

But that’s what makes it powerful...

Because somewhere in a Roman barracks or school, a man named Alexamenos had the audacity to worship a crucified God.
Not a mighty Caesar. Not Mars or Jupiter.
A man who died the most shameful death imaginable.
And his faith was so absurd,
someone just had to carve this image on..

a wall to shame him.

But here’s the twist:

The wall survived.✅
The faith survived.✅
And Alexamenos? He’s remembered, not in disgrace, but in marvel.✅

This image, meant to laugh at him, now testifies to something far greater than ridicule:
That belief in the absurd love,...

crucified outlasts empires.
That the foolishness of the cross confounds the wise.
That even mockery becomes a monument to the unshakable.

The graffito In its ugliness, is honest.
There’s no gilded glory here. Just the raw, radical scandal of grace.
This is Christianity in its...

early, defiant form.

So yes. Give me this donkey-headed Savior scratched on a Roman wall.
I'll take the Jesus who was laughed at, spat on, hung up to die—
and still conquered hearts across centuries and assumed such manner of glory.

That’s my Jesus.
That’s my favorite picture.

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